Google Kills Cloud Print

Post by _-david-_ » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

endorphone wrote: post #139

bpodgursky wrote: post #115

99.5% of the people upvoting this article had neither used nor heard of Cloud Print before seeing this headline. Look, I too got annoyed when Google killed Reader. It sucked for a couple days. I moved on. This doesn't even register as a product. It was an experiment that wasn't needed, so they killed it. Holding onto every silly project you ever worked on doesn't make you responsible, it makes you a directionless hoa…

I imagine everyone has heard of cloud print -- it's emblazoned on the marketing materials of a bunch of printers. It was the single way of printing from Android -- a couple of billion devices sold -- for the longest time, though it was pretty lame having to send a print job to Google so it can be printed on the device you're standing beside. Android 9 added Wi-Fi direct printing which is much more rational -- on a sm…

Post by thfuran » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

mushufasa wrote: post #260

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might not be wrong. Engineers who could be maintaining mildly profitable products could be invented new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable. If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd…

What if they just sold their low-margin-yet-profitable businesses instead of killing them? There are several tech PE firms that specialize in that niche. KKR bought Corel (of WordPerfect fame) recently. I'm also confident someone at Google already had this obvious idea. Any ex-googlers know why they chose not to / cannot do this?

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #220

davidwparker wrote: post #102

The product has been around 10 years, and they're giving over a year notice before killing it. Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit silly.

Counter-argument: Just let it sit there and keep working? Outside of security patches, if there even are any, there's always the option of "just stop touching it." After all, the whole pitch of elastic compute is you only pay for what you use. It's not like resources are being freed up for other things here. The software industry is always on this treadmill of churn, leading to stable products continuing to have a co…

Post by datguacdoh » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #283

areoform wrote: post #62

Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. Having talked with ex-googlers and current googlers, the problem seems to be deeply baked into their culture. The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one. The fix seems to be obvious, create a separate path, a maintenance and growth hacker path, where pe…

That's funny because other than Google Street View, I can't think of any "sexy" things Google has done. It's mostly really mundane (if sometimes well executed) products and me-too style copycats of chat products. Oh and of course tons of horrible ad tech stuff. I can't say Google's launched anything exciting in the past decade. If they're shooting for sexy, they're failing miserably.

Post by foobiekr » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

0xEFF wrote: post #230

thfuran wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the expected value of not having your brand known for routinely canceling products without much notice? It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important - and that's bad for Google.

> It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important. Companies depend heavily on AdWords, gSuite, and Cloud and all three continue to grow. The reputation for canceling projects which aren't working may matter to consumers, but I haven't seen anyone in business mention it in their purchasing decisions.